La Santé prison: visitors welcome

The site of riots, executions and dramatic escapes, La Santé in central Paris is the most infamous prison in France. When it closed recently for a four-year modernisation programme, the public were invited to visit…

The last vespasienne left standing in Paris stands on the Boulevard Arago just beneath the walls of La Santé prison. Not so long ago these green public urinals were almost as synonymous with Paris as the Eiffel tower or the Sacré-Coeur. They also played a minor but crucial role in Parisian cultural history – not only (and most obviously) as an erotic meeting place for gay people but also as cover for French resistance activities during the second world war. Then in the 1990s they were quietly disappeared and replaced with the grey sanisettes where Parisians can now relieve themselves in privacy and isolation. This last urinal, now clogged with mud and leaves, stands in its own way as a spectral monument to an older, earthier Paris, a long way from the sleek 21st century of the city.

The same might well be said of La Santé prison, which looms so large and menacingly over the urinal and the boulevard. Apart from the Bastille, this is the most famous prison in French history. It has been here since 1867 and its inmates have included Jean Genet, Carlos the Jackal, the crooked businessman Bernard Tapie, the rogue financier Jérôme Kerviel, Manuel Noriega and – most beloved by Parisians – the swaggering gangster Jacques Mesrine. In 1978, Mesrine climbed over its walls and went on the run. He was a master of disguise who loved tweaking the nose of the police. For many Parisians, he was a glamorous antihero – wanting to see him as a romantic outlaw, his admirers overlooked the fact that he was also a ruthless killer.

All of this, according to the public relations wing of the French prison service, has made La Santé a lieu de mémoire (“a site of memory”), a term used by French historians to denote buildings and monuments that are charged with historical meaning. Celebrated in song by the likes of Georges Brassens and Yves Duteil, who both lamented its stern and gloomy walls, as well as a backdrop in countless French gangster movies, La Santé has always had a mythic aura for Parisians.

Jacques Mesrine, nicknamed ‘the man of a thousand faces’, in the high-security quarters of La Santé in 1978, from which he was to escape. Photograph: Tony Comiti/Corbis

That is not just because of the star quality of its past inmates but also because it is situated right in the heart of Paris in the otherwise smart and arty district of Montparnasse. It is indeed situated only a few steps away from a primary school. The cries of children mingling with the noise of shouting prisoners are part of the strange atmosphere in this part of town. I have been living here for nearly a decade and, like everyone else, I enjoy the street markets, cafés and bookshops. But if you live here you are always aware too of La Santé, lying just beyond the crossroads at Denfert-Rochereau, radiating its dangerous and ambiguous charisma.

In the past few years, however, the French government has been determined to improve the image of its prisons. In part this move was a reaction by politicians, provoked by professionals in the prison service who have been complaining for a long time that the French system has been falling behind European standards (when I was conducting research in French prisons in 2012 that is what all senior prison officers said to me). Most famously, these complaints caught fire in 2000 when Véronique Vasseur, La Santé’s chief medical officer, published a book, Médecin-chef à la prison de la Santé, which told the story of the prison from the inside.

Vasseur’s unflinching account of life in La Santé sickened the French public. She described how the place was infested with rats and cockroaches, inmates were piled on top of one another, suicidal prisoners were left in chains (drinking disinfectant was one of the most common ways to try to kill yourself). There were the kind of severe wounds usually only seen in wartime along with trench foot and other skin infections thought left behind in the 19th century. Most shocking of all to readers was that La Santé was a “city within the city”, with its own rules and a morality governed by violence and illogic. The prison had apparently been abandoned by the French authorities to disease and death.

Since then three of the most notorious blocks in La Santé have been closed down and now the prison is closed for four years [aside from operating as a day centre for parole prisoners]while renovations take place – the government has claimed that its models for reform in its prisons are second to none. Hence also the decision to open up La Santé to public scrutiny as part of the official Journées du Patrimoine – a series of heritage days every autumn when the government opens up places of historical importance that are normally hidden from the public gaze. The initiative was launched 30 years ago by Jack Lang, minister for culture under François Mitterrand. The first aim was, in the new spirit of socialism sweeping the land under Mitterrand, to demystify the impenetrable secrets of official France.

That was why, on a blustery Sunday afternoon on the rue Messier, at the old exit from La Santé, I was chatting with a group of young people – students, teachers, IT workers. They were smoking, shivering, and speaking all at once. They all talked with awed tones, as if they have been through an extreme experience. As part of a Journée du Patrimoine, they had all just been on an escorted tour of La Santé, including the execution yard and high-security wing.

All of them said that they had not expected their day trip to the prison to be quite so disturbing. “I thought it would be educational,” said one, “but now I feel a bit strange.” The rue Messier is a peculiarly bleak and narrow street, the first view of freedom for the countless thousands of released prisoners since 1867. Directly across the street, until the 1980s, there was a café called A la bonne Santé (literally, “to your good health” – santé means health) where the newly freed men would toast their liberty before drinking themselves dead drunk. Standing there, after a visit of only a few hours, you are bound to feel strange – it felt as if we were trespassing on someone else’s bad memories. I asked the group, why did they come here? One visitor replied: “I don’t know. I thought I would learn something about our history, and I did. But it’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.” Another said that he felt both sad and elated – that he had just experienced something he never expected to see in his whole life. “Now I have seen it I don’t want to keep those images in my head,” he said.

A week earlier I had been on the same tour of the prison with an invited group of journalists, escorted by a group of tough-looking young women and a warder who joshed his way through the corridors between walls of peeling paint. The first thing I noticed as I went into the prison was the recent proclamation from the republic banning the use of the veil in public spaces.

There was nothing of the museum about the visit – no special exhibitions or explanatory signs. Everything was clean, rubbed raw but real. As we began the tour properly in the Cour d’Honneur, the former entrance to the prison, I asked where the executions had taken place and where the guillotine had been used. “Right where you are standing,” said the guard. “Until 1939 the guillotine was used just outside but after that all the executions took place here so that the whole prison knew about them.”

Public executions took place outside the prison walls in the rue de La Santé well into the 20th century. The last public beheading was actually in 1939 (for the purposes of comparison, the last public execution in England took place in 1868). The unfortunate victim in the rue de La Santé was Max Bloch, a burglar and double murderer. As was the tradition, the execution took place at dawn and attracted a crowd of several hundred who came to make a party out of it – “to see a murderer’s head pop like a champagne cork”, as one gore-hound put it.

Cell block A at La Santé when it was still functioning in 2008. Patrick Landmann Photograph: Getty Images

Executions continued throughout the second world war, except that now it was the Germans, who were killing French Resistance fighters. Eighteen of them were either guillotined or shot by firing squad during this period. The occupation ended with a riot during which 28 prisoners were shot on the orders of the German régime. The last execution – by guillotine – actually took place here in 1972. The executioner was André Obrecht, the second chief executioner in France, who made a separate living as a bookmaker and with a business selling ice cream on the Paris cinema circuit.

La Santé is actually quite a small prison. It is divided into two levels – the upper and the lower. Until 2000 the prisoners were racially segregated – there was a block for “Western Europe”, “Black Africa”, “North Africa”, and “The Rest of the World”. The most depressing aspect of the prison is how overcrowded it must have been when prisoners were there. The cells are tiny. As recently as 2013, the lawyer Etienne Noël, a prominent advocate of prisoners’ rights in France, published angry reports that in La Santé each prisoner had no more than two square metres to himself. The maximum-security cells are even more claustrophobic – tight boxes where you can almost stretch your arms and touch both walls at the same time.

Overcrowding was a major factor in suicides. It was also a great incentive to escape. Probably the most daring of all of the great escapes from La Santé was that of Michel Vaujour in 1986, whose wife, Nadine, swooped into the courtyard to snatch him up in a helicopter she was piloting. As the police and guards gnashed their teeth, the whole of Paris applauded the daring and poetry of this escape, later to become the subject of two films. Like Jacques Mesrine, Michel Vaujour became a folk hero, another bandit on the run – until he was shot down and crippled in a vengeful stand-off with police a few months later.

On the last day of the visits to La Santé I spoke to Valérie Cormont, a senior officer in the prison system. We stood in front of an impatient queue of people at the entrance, their hopes of getting into the prison fading fast. Cormont expressed her amazement that within the first few hours of the announcement that the prison was to open to the public, more than 2,000 applications had been made. On the first day, visitors were running to get into the prison at eight in the morning.

There had always been “something special” about La Santé, Cormont explained. Staff and prisoners seem to agree. One former inmate, who was on the day-visit but who did not want to be named, described his experiences there to me as “staying with [him] like a tattoo”. The people in the queue agreed too that La Santé was a special place. For all French people, La Santé is the prison; its walls and its inmates alike have an iconic status. There is, of course, a kind of nostalgia at work here. For all its grimness, a prison like La Santé can look quaint and even homely in the new century, and as I strolled around the building with the press pack, listening to the stories of wisecracking old lags, it began to seem more like Porridge than a den of vicious despair.

No doubt that was partly because of the absence of prisoners. I compared my visit to my first time in a French prison – the prison of Fresnes to the south of Paris. Fresnes is of the same vintage as La Santé and boasts a similar roll-call of notorious ex-cons. But these days Fresnes is a far harder, less controllable place than La Santé. Like many French prisons, Fresnes has a majority population of Muslims, many of whom have become radicalised and declare themselves at war with the French state. It is estimated that 70% of prisoners in France are Muslim, though no one really knows – French law forbids defining people by religion or ethnicity. The guards I spoke to in Fresnes described the radical Muslims as a sort of secret army; they told me how with the Basques, Corsicans, Romanians and “ordinary decent” criminals, you could almost be friends with them on the outside. But not with the radical Muslims who answered only to God and were constantly threatening revenge and war.

It was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, that supreme chronicler of Parisian low-life (and pro-Nazi anti-semite), who said that you can only judge a country when you have seen its prisons. Céline himself was no stranger to confinement. After the second world war, he spent a year and a half in prison in Denmark accused of being a collaborator. In his great novel of the 1930s, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), praised by Orwell and Trotsky, Céline also said that “all of the desires of the poor are punished by prison”.

This is indeed how generations of Parisians have seen La Santé and why it occupies such an important place in the cultural history of the city and is deeply inscribed into the city’s folklore. The reality is, however, that the French prison system is under great strain and faces totally new challenges related to geo-political tensions in north Africa and the Middle East. As a consequence, say the prison authorities, La Santé is now being rebuilt to suit the new prison population of the 21st century. The old-school voyous (“bad guys”) – the bandits, swindlers and assassins – from the cobbled streets of old Paris are now no more than legends.

In the same way, La Santé in its present dilapidated state belongs firmly to the last century – a melancholic reminder of a different, disappearing civilisation. It remains to be seen whether future generations of Parisians will remember the ghosts of La Santé. This is no doubt why the French government has opened the place up to the public; not only to remind Parisians of their transgressive histories but also to demonstrate that the past really is now behind them.

But for the time being, it only takes a short stroll in Montparnasse, down towards rue de La Santé, and then a few yards further on, to find yourself before the high grey-green walls of the prison. And then, as you stand where the guillotine once stood, alongside the last vespasienne in Paris, you’ll sense the tangy whiff of what was for so long the stuff of Parisian nightmares.

Andrew Hussey is director of the University of London’s Centre for Post-Colonial Studies School of Advanced Study, Paris

This article was amended on 10 January 2018 to remove two visitor’s names.